Wild Kids
Two Novels About Growing Up
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
These two searingly funny and unsettling portraits of teenagers beyond the control and largely beneath the notice of adults in 1980s Taiwan are the first English translations of works by Taiwan's most famous and best-selling literary cult figure. Chang Ta-chun's intricate narrative and keen, ironic sense of humor poignantly and piercingly convey the disillusionment and cynicism of modern Taiwanese youth.
Interweaving the events between the birth of the narrator's younger sister and her abortion at the age of nineteen, the first novel, My Kid Sister, evokes the complex emotional impressions of youth and the often bizarre social dilemmas of adolescence. Combining discussions of fate, existentialism, sexual awakening, and everyday "absurdities" in a typically dysfunctional household, it documents the loss of innocence and the deconstruction of a family.
In Wild Child, fourteen-year-old Hou Shichun drops out of school, runs away from home, and descends into the Taiwanese underworld, where he encounters an oddball assortment of similarly lost adolescents in desperate circumstances. This novel will inevitably invite comparisons with the classic The Catcher in the Rye, but unlike Holden Caulfield, Hou isn't given any second chances. With characteristic frankness and irony, Chang's teenagers bear witness to a new form of cultural and spiritual bankruptcy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Can Taiwan's teen angst grab American readers? Let's hope so: Chang writes accessible, knowing and very funny fiction about youth and screwed-up families--some of the best of its kind. A literary superstar and major bestseller in Taiwan, Chang is treated there (as translator Berry's introduction explains) like a big-time movie star. His first publication in English consists of My Kid Sister (1993) and Wild Child (1996), both narrated by the witty, appealing, former Taipei delinquent Big Head Spring. In My Kid Sister, Big Head weaves together stories about his adolescence and its cast of supporting characters: comically quarrelsome grandparents, an unstable mother, a dominating father, a first girlfriend, a couple of difficult schoolmates and above all a defiant sister, whose escapades "help her learn just how very crazy and unfair this world is." Among the topics Chang addresses are Chinese legends, wet dreams, music lessons, divorce, Taiwanese politics, middle-school quarrels, pregnancy, "the secret method of how to make your penis larger," amateur videography, death and mourning, and "how terrifying an ability storytelling can be." His wry nuances should attract fans of J.D. Salinger; the faux-na f ironies, well-concealed literariness and occasional metafictional touches could remind older readers of Grace Paley. Younger fans will simply enjoy the voice: at the climax of one tale, Big Head complains to himself, "Your dad is having an affair, except for playing her violin your sister doesn't understand shit, and your mother is insane." Wild Child's terse, understated chapters chronicle young Big Head's involvement with a gang, whose violent, scarred but loyal members form a kind of surrogate family: the later novel seems less fresh in English, far more tied to its Taipei milieu. My Kid Sister, on the other hand, could be America's next teen classic.
